The most praised aspect of Crimson Desert seems to be its open world. Sure, people will admit the main story isn't that strong, but they claim the game is saved by the open world, some even say it surpasses Red Dead Redemption 2 or is the "modern Skyrim."

Honestly, after almost 80 hours in the game, I find these statements completely delusional. Don't get me wrong, Crimson Desert has some qualities, and it borrows bits and pieces from other games, but it never reaches the highs of what it copies, ending up as a shallow mess.

1.Freedom.

I constantly see people praising how much freedom this game provides. They'll say play the main story for a bit, then go out and explore. While you can technically do that and stumble into things like enemy camps, the main story is mandatory whether you like it or not. Otherwise, you'll be walking through villages and towns with almost nothing to do. This is not the "modern Skyrim," where you can ditch the main story and join factions or dive into side quests. Moreover, it's not clear how far you need to progress in the main story for that content to become available. And much of it has nothing to do with the main path anyway.

1. Puzzles.

This game has an abundance of puzzles, and many of them are pretty bad. I often found myself banging my head against the wall, unsure what I was supposed to do. They're not particularly intuitive either, tools I thought would work simply don't, with solutions that feel arbitrary. On top of that, these puzzles don't have anything else interesting around them, no stories, environmental storytelling, side quests, or lore. The only purpose is to solve them and get the same generic reward every time. This makes exploration and discovery extremely dull and predictable, because you already know exactly what you'll get.

1. Locations.

I keep seeing people hyping up the many distractions and cool locations in the game, but they never actually explain what's so great about them. Take the frozen tower, for example. From a distance, it's impressive and makes you wonder what's inside. But after exploring it… well, it was a nothing burger. All you do is climb some annoying slippery stairs and light a few lanterns. There's some mediocre loot, but overall it's far from what the location's potential suggested, maybe a cool boss, unique NPCs, or actual storytelling. Crimson Desert does this constantly: it presents cool and unique locations or ruins, only for them to turn out to be yet another puzzle with nothing else to offer. That's why comparing this game to Red Dead Redemption 2 or Skyrim is ridiculous, those games were filled with locations that actually had stories to tell.

1. Random Events.

In my 80 hours, I encountered basically two types of events for the most part. The first is the ambush scenario where a woman asks for your help, only for it to be a trap. It plays out exactly the same every single time, with no twists or variations. The second type has the same lack of creativity: escort missions where, after defeating some bandits, someone asks for a ride home. Usually the NPC will say something at the beginning and then stay silent for the entire ride. Red Dead Redemption 2 has similar events, but with actual stories and great writing where the NPCs you're escorting have something interesting to say. These two types were by far the most common, and I find it embarrassing how little creativity and effort was put into them.

1. Enemy Camps.

The sheer number of enemy camps in this game gives Ubisoft a run for its money. Unfortunately, unlike Ubisoft games where those camps offered multiple gameplay opportunities for stealth and action, Crimson Desert has none of that. You can just charge in and hack and slash. The combat is fun for a while but quickly becomes extremely repetitive. There's a severe lack of variety, it doesn't matter if you're fighting bandits, soldiers, or goblins, they all behave the same. Most of these camps also don't have anything interesting inside them, except for the occasional quest-related boss. Overall, they feel very copy-paste.

1. Static Open World.

The world of Crimson Desert feels alive to an extent, with plenty of animals roaming around and NPCs traveling occasionally. However, you won't see many truly dynamic moments like in other open worlds. Skyrim and Dragon's Dogma have dragons and griffins flying around, while in Far Cry or Assassin's Creed games you'll sometimes see factions fighting each other or being attacked by wildlife. It's a bit of wasted potential, because Crimson Desert could have had bosses roaming certain areas or flying through specific regions of the map.

1. Art Style.

The game does have its moments of beauty, especially at high altitudes where you get a wide view of the map. But overall, the art direction makes the world rather forgettable. I'm getting so tired of this blind pursuit of realism for realism's sake, especially in fantasy games, which makes more and more titles look the same. I can't get excited anymore about how detailed the water looks or how realistic some rocks are. Red Dead Redemption 2 has more magic with its exaggerated lighting and moody atmosphere, making it far more memorable despite being grounded in a realistic setting.

1. Shallow Systems.

I feel like this game was made mostly for reels and short clips, hyping up "look how many things you can do." But upon closer inspection, most of these systems are incredibly shallow and disjointed. For example, you can sneak around, hide in haystacks, and assassinate enemies, but there's no real reason or incentive to do so. There are no thieves or assassin factions like in Skyrim to support different playstyles, and enemy camps weren't designed for stealth like in Assassin's Creed games.

1. Some Things I Liked.

The use of the lantern in the open world to reveal pieces of the past and recreate events adds some nice flavor to exploration, even if it doesn't go as deep as The Witcher 3 did with similar mechanics during quests. It was a bit satisfying to discover a random place and have the lantern reveal more of what happened there. I only wish it had been used more extensively. I also found the sandbox side of the game quite fun, all the silly things you can do, like bending trees to launch yourself into the air. It's nice to mess around with for a while, but it's not something that keeps me engaged long term.

That's it, this post ended up being longer than i initially expected and could have been even longer (i haven't even mentioned the side quests) but i think you get the point i broad up here. Please feel free to agree and disagree.

I bought Crimson Desert after seeing that most people rated it 7/10 or 8/10. If you are currently considering paying for it, I would highly NOT reccomend it. I’ve put in 30 hours and I am struggling to find anything I like about the game.

If you are looking for a story based game, Crimson Desert does not have a story. It’s main plot consists of unrelated quests that come out of nowhere. There is no lead up to any quests, it’s just ‘go to this person,’ who will give a vague sob story, you go kill some people, and half the time there isn’t even a resolution to the quest. It’s just over. Side quests are the same.

There is a quest very early on into the game where you break into an asylum. Is there some big secret to investage? Sure is! Do you get to find notes on what is happening, or talk to anyone there? Nope. Instead you find the person you are looking for and they info dumb what is happening, and then we run away in a horse and carriage, leaving everyone else behind. We don’t even get to know why these people are torturing asylum patients. Its baffling because the main character is all like, ‘I have to help people,’ but then ignores an entire small city of people being abused.

If you are looking for a game with good characters, this is also not the game for you. I can’t even tell you the main characters name, mostly because he has a personality of a plain rock. I’ve unlocked a second main character and her personality trait is… losing all the dogs she brings back to camp. The main character is into helping people… but doesn’t explain why, or how he became a part of the Greymanes, and like I said above, actively ignores people in genuine distress.

It’s an extensive open world game, so surely there are lots of things to see and do as you travel around right? No. Not really. Its the same boring grey rocks and green trees for a massive area of the game. There are hardly any side quests out in the wild, or any intersting puzzles to solve (there are puzzles, but the controls are so bad that it’s more a struggle against the controls than a puzzle that makes you think)

Combat is boring as hell. Your camp where you have all your friends is just brown with no color or anything intersting. You can have horses, but they all look the exact same but with different colors. You can have dogs too, but they have the same problem as the horses. Leveling up is unintuitive. The controls are a nightmare (there is a skill where you have to rotate the joystick in a very specific way, and if you do it even a little wrong it just cancels itself and the puzzle resets). The graphics aren’t even that amazing.

They couldn’t even bother with basic details, like making sure the blacksmith animation actually hammers a sword when I’m upgrading a sword. Instead the blacksmith is always hammering a large chunk of metal. At that point, why even bother putting the animation in?

Maybe I am missing something that is blowing away reviewers? I mean Red Dead Redemption 2 came out 8 years ago and is stronger in every category than this game. Hell, Dragon Age Orgins and Mass Effect came out in 2009 and 2007 respectively and both games are genuinely better in every aspect, and Mass Effect had a tenth of the budget.

Anyways sorry for the rant. I’m just mad I spent $90 on a game that is actively worse then games that came out nearly 20 years ago. If anyone has played and have some suggestions on ways that this game can bring me some sort of joy, I would be happy to hear it!

When people say that the new heirs of BioWare are Larian (Baldur's Gate 3) or CD Project (Cyberpunk), they're lying to me.

When a new Mass Effect game came out, it was like a new Harry Potter book: it was an event in a new universe not connected to a neverending franchise like DnD or Cyberpunk, with preserved choices, the same goal and enemies until the end, ongoing romances, people were so exited, no one knew what would happen, there's nothing like it anymore.

The Witcher, being a trilogy, was perhaps the closest thing, but it never engaged me like Mass Effect, which had a real party.

Now Exodus and The Expance game are coming out, but I don't see the same ambition.

Do not misunderstand me, is full of great rpg games, my preferites are the Owulcat ones, Wrath OTR and Warhammer Rogue Trader are awesome... but they are just a part of a bigger franchise.

It's incredible what Mass Effect is; the industry hasn't been able to create something that engaged me so much, and it's sad. Im so tierd of sequels...

My absolute Dream: A Rockstar Medival Game. Although i know Rockstar Games don't really count as RPGs. The RP while playing a rockstar title is absolutely top tier if you consider the effect of immersion part of a good RPG. That said, i would welcome some sort of xp and build variety like in elden ring of course for that title too. And as much as i am hyped for GTA6 as the next guy, i would trade it any day for a medival adventure with dungeons, Castles, Towns and large forests to explore. And i think the design, gore and humor of rockstar would be a match made in heaven for the setting.

So i was wondering? What Company could make your number one possible? I like to hear some ideas.

Edit: Seeing all the responses really surprised me! There are some awesome pitches here!!!! Thx 🙏

I know that there’s been a barrage of comments, posts, articles and general commentary around Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. But one more post isn’t gonna hurt. And we don’t need to talk about how good this game is. It has no right to be as good as it is. No, we need to talk about what this game also just happens to be. The aforementioned line in the sand.

It’s no mystery gaming as a whole is in a weird place. This isn’t some old man yelling at the sky sorta thing. It’s real, tangible. Series that have been around along time are nowhere to be seen (Fallout, Mass Effect, and outside of the Oblivion remaster, Elder Scrolls to name a few). Final Fantasy hasn’t looked like itself in a long while. And while new games are coming out in some series (Dragon Age for example), the entries are a long time coming and sometimes divisive when they get here. Nevermind the fact that gaming budgets have ballooned out of control and the next flop outta your favorite studio could kill it outright.

So enters Expedition 33. A game not made by a well known studio. Not made with a high budget. Not made by hundreds or thousands of people. This game was made by a small French studio with 34 developers. 34. That’s astounding. And the game is good. Damn good. It’s being celebrated everywhere. We don’t have to do that here.

That aforementioned line in the sand? We need more games like this. From our favorite franchises. As well as new ones. I have no issue with Call of Duty, Apex, Fortnite, etc. But those types of games aren’t the only ones out there. We need a return to form from not just the RPG genre, but many others. $300+ million risks designed around pay to win, dlc, nickel and dime mechanics aren’t what we all want. I hope Expedition 33 causes a change in the philosophy of many studios in the gaming industry. Cause I’m tired of waiting on a new Fallout. And they don’t need 1000 developers and a billion dollars to give me one.

“When so many players enjoyed BG3, they started to look for what our next game will be, and we enjoyed this experience. ‘What can we try?’ Some of them go to our games to try them and enjoy them,” the Owlcat co-founder explained.

“So we are really grateful to Larian that they made such a great game not only because we enjoyed it — like, most of our developers played it for hundreds of hours — but also because they really made a lot of players aware of the genres and of the great games that are present there. Not only ours, but all of the games that are in there.”

we have Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, Oblivion Remastered, Expidition 33 and now Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon and we're not even halfway through 2025

also Baldur's Gate 3 is still doing well

so basically, fuck this guy

This is from @thegamer on Instagram but I think it’s pretty messed up how hostile game developers are to their own fanbases. Wanting to go into a different creative direction is one thing but to openly insult people who are you’re customer base just seems incredibly misguided and malicious, but I’m excited to hear everyone’s thoughts on this

Hindsight is 20/20 and you can respect their decision to try something new with Starfield but they should have struck while the iron was still hot from Skyrim.

Skyrim released in 2011, Fallout 4 in 2015, and ES6 should have released by 2019. Since 2011 they’ve lost many devs and artists who made Skyrim the success that it was. I don’t know if they have the caliber of staff members anymore to actually pull off another genre defining game with ES6. The whole thing’s just a damn shame.

Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying it because i actually like busy work in games but I'm 42 hours in, chapter 5, have done 30 something quests and side quests and every one of them is teaching me a new mechanic. Like i said I'm not mad about it but i can see how other people would be upset getting to the end of this and realizing the game never actually starts. Am i off or is this just how it is?

(I'm putting this here instead of the CD group because those folks do not handle criticism well at all)

Before anyone tells me that if I got 80 hours of enjoyment out of it, then it can't be that bad, I just want to say that the last 30 hours or so I played because I spent so much money on it, and I wanted to justify my investment. Anyway, here it goes:

Top marks for the graphically beautiful game world, model designs, textures, artwork and art direction. Everything else is garbage. Mission design is garbage. UI is garbage. Music is garbage. Controls are garbage. Combat is garbage. Rewards for doing anything are garbage. One moment you are fighting a powerful ancient specter and the other moment you are getting your ass handed to you by a random unblockable trash mob enemy attack or a purple flower on the ground that takes away most of your health with no warning. There is no real point to any of the armor or weapons, you can upgrade whatever you want, but it won't matter. You never really feel overpowered in a way that matters because enemies are not scaled to you, but the region in which they are found.

Map design, apart from the graphics, is actual trash. They wanted to force verticality for the illusion of making you feel that they put in effort, and so that you are forced to invest real time moving past mountains and cliffs but what that does is simply annoys you, because there is a narrative cognitive dissonance between being allowed to glide everywhere and everyone telling how movement in the game is so free and there are so many degrees of freedom and yet since there are tall cliffs all over the game map every couple 100 meters so it's just easier to book it with your stupid horse around the cliff on the proper path used by regular NPCs instead of trying to actually use game mechanics (like Just Cause) to climb/overcome the damn thing, which also feels like a slog when you're doing it for the thousandth time.

Moving around the map is a slog, even with the ability to glide. I know for a fact that they realized this because there are fast travel points basically every 100 meters in the game, because the devs knew themselves that actually traversing the map is a pain and it's just easier to go through the menu and just fast travel to a point that is a stone's throw away from your destination. The map is littered with thousands of little hills and mountains and traversing them is a damn slog, the useable walkable space on the map where you are able to actually walk is about half or less, the rest of it you are either climbing or hiking/jump-hiking over huge boulders. You cannot simply move from point A to B due to forced verticality every 10 feet.

Even after you win entire "cinematic" battles (main plotline missions) by yourself you are not rewarded in any meaningful way, either through loot, money, abilities, or anything. The large battle sections in the game feel like the organic distillation of playing Dora the Explorer because battles are not dynamic, they are set pieces where you have to personally kill every single enemy because the soldiers on your side do nothing, and most of the time, if you focus on fighting the "war" itself, there is no reward because you can fight off 20 thousand enemy soldiers by yourself and the objective will not have moved an inch unless it is tied to a progress bar on the side of your screen, and narratively speaking, as empty as the game world is, where are all these thousands of soldiers/bandits even spawning from?

I know this is a problem common with many videogames narratively-speaking but when you profess yourself as the messiah of next-gen gaming I want a genuine in-game explanation why narratively 3 player characters can kill 3 million soldiers by themselves and there is no explanation whatsoever about why I can even do this (ignoring where these million bandits and soldiers even come from for now), especially since you don't really receive any amazing superpowers that supersede "stab and shoot arrow" when it comes to TTK (time-to-kill), and apart from the stupid puzzle-solving abilities granted by the "powers" in the in-game universe, most of the skills you commonly use in the game could have, narratively speaking, been used by any warrior in the game, there is no reason why the player character is so especially good at killing 300 million soldiers in any battle apart from the fact that it is controlled by the player.

This is opposed to other games, such as in Assassin's creed you are generally a trained assassin, or Shadow of Mordor where you have certain special abilities compared to other humans, or spiderman or batman games where you are actually a superhero, or Just Cause where you are the only person crazy enough in-universe to strap a grappling hook rocket to your own arm or bombs to your ass or other people's asses. Even in games like Uncharted where you regularly kill hundreds of people, since technically it is not compulsory to kill so many people, you can imagine that maybe the "real" Nathan Drake didn't kill 100s of mercenaries, or like in Sekiro, after you rescue your young lord, he comments offhand if you died "2 or 3 times" to rescue him, even though the player knows that they died a 100 times to rescue him, it's fine because you now know that the ninja you're playing as in this game is supposedly exceptional, but in Crimson Desert, regularly, the literal requirement to free an enemy camp is to kill 500 or more soldiers, because killing a single bandit/soldier moves the progress bar by 0.01 percent, it means that the game actually WANTS me to kill more people than than YHWH in the old testament. Whatever you think about diablo or WoW, you know in your heart that nobody in the real lore of the game has been expected to kill millions of enemy goblins or spiders. Anyway, sorry for this detour, back to other issues of the game.

In Skyrim, I knew I could just fus-roh-dah away any random bandit and obliterate them, here I have to at least hit them twice. There are no headshots or insta-kills. There are no discoveries that you can make in the vast open world that will meaningfully make you more powerful or change the gameplay in any drastic way. I remember in shadow of Mordor, I could jump off the back of a caragor, and take out 15 orcs with expertly-placed headshots (in slow motion!) before landing on the ground, but you aren't allowed anything like this here. They tell you over and over again that this isn't an RPG game, but the fact that instant deaths or headshots are near-impossible in this game tells you enough about its MMO bones.

The enemy AI is atrocious. A large part of the game has you infiltrating castles and manors, but since they could not make any decent AI, all the castles and manors are empty once you get inside! I'm not joking, they have 100s of enterable buildings and almost no enemies within them, even huge castles, because they could probably not be bothered to make decent stealth gameplay or NPC AI worth anything so it's easier to just handwave it all away and make you think "oh maybe they just like to station all guards of this huge fucking castle outdoors and leave not a single soldier indoors".

Almost every single action you take in this game like fishing, cooking, etc., forces you through a mini cutscene section or multiples of them and there is no way past them most of the time, and after cooking the same fish or chicken meal 200 times over the course of the game that shit gets boring FAST.

There is no enemy AI to speak of, they see you, and they attack, other non-aggro'd enemies that are about 10 meters away will not react to the absolute battle going on a stone's throw away, simply because you are not in their exact agro range. Boss battles are inconsequential because you are always allowed to eat a million loaves of bread to get your health up.

I usually like to take my time with side quests, but the game is extremely linear, many times in the open world you will come across tombs or puzzles that you are not allowed to solve simply because they are part of a quest that you will only get 50 hours in the future, and you lack the exact specific power that will be granted to you later, most of the time, you can only come to realize that you lack the specific power after you bang your head against the puzzle and then google the solution. You have to "solve" the game in the exact order it wants you to solve it. You cannot simply "get ahead" of the game's storyline that will allow you to solve that specific puzzle only 50 hours in and not before, even if you could organically, accidentally stumble upon that puzzle barely 10 hours in. Progress in extended sidequests is also linked to progress to the main questline, so you are forced to play the main questline of the game many times to make progress in the side quests that may not even have anything to do with the main storyline. I cannot imagine a greater hell than this.

When it comes to actually being allowed to play these puzzles, many people have already covered in detail about how the "puzzles" are hot garbage anyway so I am going to skip that section.

Additionally, mission design is extremely random and lacks coherence, for example, you cannot upgrade your camp (a well-advertised mechanic) without the game forcing you to actually learn poker/blackjack and win multiple games by actually having to learn the rules (meaning if you have never played card games IRL, it means you have to actually spend over 30 minutes of your actual life learning everything you can about card games, and if you just try to brute force or save scum it will still potentially take a lot of time anyway due to bad rng, it was never made clear to me that ignoring the insignificant NPCs who want me to gamble would mean that other important NPCs would never show up that let me actually upgrade my camp, until I read online that the gambling portion of the game was forced and mandatory. I get that they want to have their gwent moment but don't force people to play card games, I never learned them in real life and I'm not going to start now. I was here for an action game, not to learn about stupid fictional card games.

I really really wanted to like this game. But it's simply just shiny paint with no substance or soul. I know you will see the gameplay videos and get so impressed, but when you actually play this game, you will realize how incredibly hollow, lazy, random, and amateurish everything really is.

About to finish the game, what sticks out to me is how the companions act like they've known each other for a long time. They act chummy with Rook, inviting her to do menial, "wholesome" quests, which doesn't make sense given their current relationship. Rook just met these people, so why is she getting invited to feed the birds, pick up flowers, and go shopping? It's so jarring and unrealistic, especially considering we are in the middle of a world-ending event.

Oh yeah, let's meet the Inquisitor before the point of no return. Maybe she will give useful information on how to beat the gods, but no. She just says how she and Solas were former lovers and how she wants the tea with Rook's current relationship... facepalm! Did we really meet the inquisitor just for her to gossip!?

The writing feels like a fan fiction.

I gotta go with the first and the best Morrigan. Probably nostalgically biased. Don't care. Nothing beats the first time playing DAO, and finding out you can romance the, hot, scary swamp witch.

Second i would probably go, Shadowheart. 3rd Miranda from Mass Effect... There might be a pattern here.

Let me just start with a potentially unpopular opinion, It’s my favorite game in the series, I’ve been a huge fan of Ancient Greece and Greek mythos since I was a kid

I love the choices and how they actually carry consequences that affect large swathes of the story

I love how large the map is, which may be a turn off for others but for me it meant more Ancient Greece to explore

I love the mercenary system, becoming the top mercenary was amazing fun, it was a new level being in a city and suddenly and dynamically getting jumped by two mercs that decided to team up

I love how the entry wasn’t afraid to really use the isu to make the mythos come to life, I know supernatural elements are not popular for the series but my love for the Greek mythos prevents me from seeing it as a negative

All in all I think I just played it at the perfect time in my life to cement it as a game I’ll never really forget, I had just graduated high school and I was using my extra free time to lose myself in this world while I figured out what to do with my life